Hi Scott,
Attached is the previously generated Mac OS X patch updated for 0.3.1.
Any chance of you patching dvdauthor for the next release or implementing
the changes in the patch?
-James
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 02:59:09PM -0800, Scott Smith wrote:
>
> has been released. Mostly small improvements -- ifogen runs much much
> faster, especially with long videos; using the -m option to makedvd
> retains a/v sync, and you can pass in videos that don't start at
> exactly 0.00 seconds.
>
> Scott

Hi!
> From: Scott Smith <scott@...>
>
> has been released. Mostly small improvements -- ifogen runs much much
> faster, especially with long videos; using the -m option to makedvd
> retains a/v sync, and you can pass in videos that don't start at
> exactly 0.00 seconds.
Super!
A suggestion for 0.3.2 would be to change the video attribute from
0x4300 to 0x4200 in two places. Perhaps even 0x4000 but so far
4200 has been sufficient. There are a couple bits in that field that act
to _prohibit_ a player from auto-letterboxing a widescreen DVD.
Cheers and Happy New Year!
Steven Schultz
sms@...

has been released. Mostly small improvements -- ifogen runs much much
faster, especially with long videos; using the -m option to makedvd
retains a/v sync, and you can pass in videos that don't start at
exactly 0.00 seconds.
Scott

Hi!
> From: Dan Dennedy <dan@...>
> I have a Philips 724. Besides its versatility, it is progressive scan,
> component out, 3:2 pulldown, and around USD $140! I even read somewhere
> it can play PAL videos on an NTSC system.
Quite the value for the $ isn't it? I've seen it on sale for
around $120 - not much more than the Apex piece of junk I tried
first (which didn't accept DVD+RW media).
> I created a DVD-Video a couple of months ago using Kino 0.6, mjpegtools
> 1.6.0, dvdauthor 0.2.0, and cdrecord-proDVD. When it plays on the
> Philips 724, about every 3 seconds there is a very short audio scratch
> and some video glitches that look like misplaced blocks. The mpeg output
> from mjpegtools looked fine.
Hmmm, perhaps you might try dvdauthor 0.3.0. I've made dozens of
DVDs and haven't had any audio/video glitches that were not caused
by media defects (or the writing program(s)/drive(s)).
All in all I'm very happy with the Philips player.
Cheers,
Steven Schultz
sms@...

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 11:16, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
> Hi -
>
> > From: Mark Rages <markrages@...>
> > 2) What is a good DVD player to test with? Ogle plays fine even
> > with severely mangled IFOs.
>
> The Philips 724 is the best all around "play everything" (DVD+RW,
> DVD-RW, etc) player I've found. Very versatile player (put
> generic MPEG files on a ISO filesystem works too). Ogle does a
> good job but I've a couple DVDs that trigger "assertion failed"
> messages where a hardware player keeps on going.
>
I have a Philips 724. Besides its versatility, it is progressive scan,
component out, 3:2 pulldown, and around USD $140! I even read somewhere
it can play PAL videos on an NTSC system.
I created a DVD-Video a couple of months ago using Kino 0.6, mjpegtools
1.6.0, dvdauthor 0.2.0, and cdrecord-proDVD. When it plays on the
Philips 724, about every 3 seconds there is a very short audio scratch
and some video glitches that look like misplaced blocks. The mpeg output
from mjpegtools looked fine.

Hi -
> From: Mark Rages <markrages@...>
> 2) What is a good DVD player to test with? Ogle plays fine even
> with severely mangled IFOs.
The Philips 724 is the best all around "play everything" (DVD+RW,
DVD-RW, etc) player I've found. Very versatile player (put
generic MPEG files on a ISO filesystem works too). Ogle does a
good job but I've a couple DVDs that trigger "assertion failed"
messages where a hardware player keeps on going.
Cheers,
Steven Schultz
sms@...

I am somewhat lost as to what to do.
I have a DVD that I need to back up and I'm not sure what to do exactly.
What I need to do is back up the main feature of a DVD. The problem I
have is that this will not fit on a single DVD-R and hence I need to
split this onto 2DVDs
If I use dvdbackup to generate the IFO BUP & VOB files for title 5 (the
main feature) I have too much data to fit on a single DVD
I can rename the VOBS to title 1, & split them into 2 separate
structures dvd1/VIDEO_TS and dvd2/VIDEO_TS but I assume that I can not
simply copy the IFO & BUP files into each directory and then run tocgen
(I have tried to no avail. After mkisofs -dvd-device on the dvd2
structure mplayer reports it can not find VOBS VTS_01_1)
I have also tried using mplayer -
mplayer -dvd 5 -chapter -10 -dumpstream (for the first DVD -chapter 11-
for the second)
followed by
makedvd stream.dump
Apart from not being able to create lots of directories (a problem I'm
capable of getting round) ifogen reports that stream.dump is too large
(~2.8GB)
I've read around most of the sourceforge project site for hint's & tips
but so far I've not found an idiots guide to doing this.
If someone points me in the correct direction I'll happily write a HOWTO
to publish on the site as penance for my obvious stupidity.
Details:
dvdauthor version 0.3.0
cdrtools version 2.0
mplayer version 0.90rc1-3.2
Redhat 8.0 Linux 2.4.18-19.8.0 #1 Thu Dec 12 05:39:29 EST 2002 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux
Anything else anyone needs to know, let me know
--
Steve Milner <steve@...>
--
Steve Milner <steve.milner@...>
Maplin Electronics Ltd
Maplin Electronics Ltd.
http://www.maplin.co.uk
This message is intended only for the use of the person(s) ("The intended
recipient(s)") to whom it is addressed. It may contain information which is
privileged and confidential within the meaning of applicable law. If you
are not the intended recipient please contact the sender as soon as possible.
The views expressed in this communication may not necessarily be the views
held by Maplin Electronics Ltd.

Just curious, maybe someone with knowledge of the spec can comment. When
I author DVDs with Apple DVD Studio Pro the default end action for the
last for the last track of the project is to repeat the first track. So
essentially by default it makes DVD disks that play forever if you don't
stop them.
So I was wondering, how hard is this to do, is the spec clear on how to
program the disk to do this or is it not well understood. How hard would
it be to add the functionality to dvdauthor.
I ask because right this moment I am authoring some DVD for a holiday
party out here in California. Each disk is about 25 music videos, I
considered making it in DVD Studio Pro and getting the nice auto-loop
feature, but since DVDSP is such a pain, and I actually need to sit in
front of my computer at home (I am at work now) to use it, I decided to
use dvdauthor and not get the nice auto-loop.
But now I am curios. Comments are welcomed.
Thanks,
--
Aaron Newsome <anewsome@...>

I went through ifogen.c last night and added comments to the lines where
it writes out the data. I just copied from mpucoder's site.
(http://members.aol.com/mpucoder/DVD/)
As part of this effort, I converted the decimal addresses to hex, to
easier cross-reference mpucoder's information.
I did this as a learning exercise, and before releasing the file (which
still compiles to the same binary) I would like to have somebody who
actually understands it look it over first, and hopefully avoid spreading
misionformation.
Any takers?
Regards,
Mark

> But why would the size of the .ifo file end up being 1/2 the size it
> should be just by adding the last couple hundred megabytes to the
> dataset?
my guess is that the internal timestamp that ifogen is keeping is
wrapping around some border and causing ifogen to think there are
fewer VOBU's then there actually are.
or something screwy like that.
your test seems to prove that it is timestamp related, since the only
difference between multiple files and one large file is the
timestamps....
Scott

> From: Scott Smith <scott@...>
>
> > Between 3500MB and 3750MB the creation of the .IFO files is banged up.
> > 7 files of 500MB work fine, but add in that last file motw-8.mpg of
> > 263180288 bytes and the .IFO files are 1/2 their correct size.
>
> I can't help but think this is related to the way you are creating the
> intermediate files. Not to say that it would be hard to modify ifogen
They're not intermediate files, at least I never thought of them that
way - they're simply multiple files created by mplex with an eye
towards about 15 minutes or so per "chapter".
But why would the size of the .ifo file end up being 1/2 the size it
should be just by adding the last couple hundred megabytes to the
dataset?
I've been making dozens of DVDs with the "let mplex split the files"
method - this is the first one that's had a problem.
> to work with what you've got...
That would be great! I am fairly sure I'm not the only one
splitting long encoding runs into multiple files in order to create
smaller (~10-15 minute) chapters rather than one long chapter. The
movie I'm working with now is 99 min - average bitrate about 4900Kb/s,
came out looking very nice.
As long as it's feature request time :) Reducing the realloc()
calls would speed things up a lot - for longer movies it can take
20 minutes (on a 2.2GHz P4/Xeon) for the 2 passes of ifogen to run
(a 1 pass method'd be ok too :)).
> if you can, try to create a dvd by combining all your mpgs into one
> file. something like:
No need for fifos or anything - got couple hundred gig of space
to play with :)
What i'm trying now, before I try one 99 minute 3.7G .mpg file is
splitting on a larger boundary (600MB instead of 500) to reduce the
number of chapters from 8 to 7. Nope - that didn't work either,
mkisofs still complains about the .IFO file size being short.
Ok, create one huge file is the next step.
Firing up "mplex -S 0 -o motw.mpg ..." now - oh, nuts. mplex apparently
has a 2GB hard coded limit in it:
if( max_segment_size == 0 )
max_segment_size = 2000*1024*1024;
so using '-S 0' as meaning "no limit" apparently will not work
any longer :( Yes, .vob files have size restrictions (1GB or less)
but that's makedvd's job rather than mplex's I'd think.
Maybe "mplex -S 4096 -o ..." will work... Ah, passed thru 2GB.
Resulting file is:
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 3933440000 Dec 24 22:16 motw.mpg
Now to run makedvd on it. Hang on - I'm off to get a drink (it is
Xmas Eve after all :)).
Ah, back.
The VIDEO_TS/ directory looks like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 6144 Dec 24 22:34 VIDEO_TS.BUP
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 6144 Dec 24 22:34 VIDEO_TS.IFO
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 81920 Dec 24 22:30 VTS_01_0.BUP
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 81920 Dec 24 22:30 VTS_01_0.IFO
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 1073709056 Dec 24 22:30 VTS_01_1.VOB
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 1073709056 Dec 24 22:31 VTS_01_2.VOB
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 1073709056 Dec 24 22:33 VTS_01_3.VOB
-rw-r--r-- 1 sms staff 712312832 Dec 24 22:34 VTS_01_4.VOB
and 'mkisofs -dvd-video -o /opt2/tmp/image .' runs without the error.
If I wanted a single 99 minute chapter I could burn the DVD now but
I'll just hold on to the data for a while or reencode it at a lower
bitrate to get the size down somewhat.
Merry Christmas!
Steven Schultz
sms@...

> Between 3500MB and 3750MB the creation of the .IFO files is banged up.
> 7 files of 500MB work fine, but add in that last file motw-8.mpg of
> 263180288 bytes and the .IFO files are 1/2 their correct size.
I can't help but think this is related to the way you are creating the
intermediate files. Not to say that it would be hard to modify ifogen
to work with what you've got...
if you can, try to create a dvd by combining all your mpgs into one
file. something like:
mkfifo combined.mpg
cat motw-?.mpg > combined.mpg &
makedvd combined.mpg
Scott

Hi -
> > "mplex -f 8 -S 400 -M ..."
>
> then you should just cat the files together and make a mpeg out of the
> one large file. You can use a fifo/pipe if your file system can't
Will that still get the multiple chapters? Breaking into
smaller pieces seemed to be the way to get chapters.
Leave off the -M then so that leadin/out are generated? I was
doing that but it was suggested to use -M.
> it isn't fine, though. The clock display will probably be all screwed up.
I test on my portable DVD player and it seems to get the elapsed
time in chapter, etc right. I'll double check that but it's
not something I'm concentrating on while watching the movie ;)
Steve

> Oh, they probably don't start from 0 since they were created with
> "mplex -f 8 -S 400 -M ..."
then you should just cat the files together and make a mpeg out of the
one large file. You can use a fifo/pipe if your file system can't
store the large file or if you want to avoid intermediate storage.
> > and see if any of the timestamps seem out of the ordinary.
>
> Everything plays in the standalone players just fine so I'm not
> worried ;) If multiple files created by mplex have non 0 starting
> times then that is almost certainly the cause of the oddity I saw.
it isn't fine, though. The clock display will probably be all screwed
up.
Scott

Hi -
> From: Scott Smith <scott@...>
>
> > STAT: last time=16313.68 sec
>
> that does seem a bit high
>
> you might want to use mpeg2desc on your input streams and verify that
> they all start at 0. ifogen doesn't recenter (I don't think...)
Oh, they probably don't start from 0 since they were created with
"mplex -f 8 -S 400 -M ..."
> and see if any of the timestamps seem out of the ordinary.
Everything plays in the standalone players just fine so I'm not
worried ;) If multiple files created by mplex have non 0 starting
times then that is almost certainly the cause of the oddity I saw.
Cheers,
Steven

On Tue, 2002-12-24 at 10:59, Scott Smith wrote:
> > STAT: last time=16313.68 sec
>
> that does seem a bit high
>
> you might want to use mpeg2desc on your input streams and verify that
> they all start at 0. ifogen doesn't recenter (I don't think...)
Wasn't there a report of a bad time big in mplex. Could this be causing
the errant time display?
--Aaron

> STAT: last time=16313.68 sec
that does seem a bit high
you might want to use mpeg2desc on your input streams and verify that
they all start at 0. ifogen doesn't recenter (I don't think...)
maybe try:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do
echo $i HEAD
mpeg2desc < bloodbath-$i.mpg | head
echo $i TAIL
mpeg2desc < bloodbath-$i.mpg | tail
done
and see if any of the timestamps seem out of the ordinary.
Scott

Markus Plail wrote:
>>>on a standalone DVD player)? Another thing: is chapter support being
>>>worked on? Would be great.
>>>
>>>
>>What do you exactly mean with chapters ? You can write several files
>>to the disk. And each file is a chapter.
>>
>>
>
>I thought every file is a title. Don't know if it makes a big
>difference though.
>
>
>
Chapter and Title support is in the current version. Read the README
file. If Titles are not mentioned, get a new version.
--Aaron

* Bernhard Praschinger writes:
>>Am I right when I assume that it isn't yet possible to author a DVD
>>from a mpg with two AC3 streams (and be able to choose between the two
>You can multiplex a video with two audio streams, but ifogen, is not
>able of processing it.
Is it hard to do? Or is it planned?
>>on a standalone DVD player)? Another thing: is chapter support being
>>worked on? Would be great.
>What do you exactly mean with chapters ? You can write several files
>to the disk. And each file is a chapter.
I thought every file is a title. Don't know if it makes a big
difference though.
Servas
Markus

Hi there!
Am I right when I assume that it isn't yet possible to author a DVD
from a mpg with two AC3 streams (and be able to choose between the two
on a standalone DVD player)? Another thing: is chapter support being
worked on? Would be great.
regards
Markus